Categories: Programming, Links

Useful links related to Software Development Methodology and related topics

• Beginners in Open Source - how to get involved in the Open Source world.

• Meetings - where work goes to die.

• Maintaining Software - maintaining software sucks, and what we can do about it.

• Pounding a Nail - how to respond to questions which have false assumptions.

• Software Maintenance and Dynamically-Typed Languages - why do dynamic languages make it difficult to maintain large codebases?

• The Oracle Effect - how rituals can override common sense.

• Is Project Management Killing Good Products? - how time-estimates and delivery deadlines can damage software development

• The Manifesto for Agile Development and [video] “Pragmatic” Dave Thomas: Agile is Dead

• Too much collaboration hurts productivity

• Hivemind: the problem of interruptions

• Kurt Cagle: The End of Agile - a critical view of Scrum methdology

• Matt Asay: What Makes Developers Happy?

• Thoughtworks: Pairing, Are You Doing It Wrong?

• Heusser: NoEstimates in Action: 5 Ways to Rethink Software Projects

• Hansson/BaseCamp: Building Software (ShapeUp)

• Lightweight ADRs at willhaben

• Chelsea Troy: Reviewing Pull Requests - some excellent advice on performing code-reviews

• [video] Sandy Metz: Go Ahead, Make a Mess - reducing interdependencies in code

• [video] Dan North: Beyond Developer - what it means to be a modern developer (roles, responsibilities, cooperation, community). First third is slow, the rest is very interesting!

• [video] Rich Hickey: Hammock Driven Development aka Step Away From The Computer - solve problems by thinking instead of doing

• [video] Ian Cooper: TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong – Argues that tests are intended to verify system requirements/behaviours, not methods - so do that, ie only write tests which express requirements on the overall system. Refactoring then doesn’t break tests - because refactoring never changes external behaviour, even when it changes internal implementations. This implies not testing classes in isolation; use “deep” tests instead of shallow ones. This in turn suggests that dependency isolation and injection is pointless except where code meets “the external world”.

Basic Programming Topics

• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide (see link “Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas”) - a guide to learning the Ruby programming language.

• Git Ready: learn git one commit at a time - how to use the Git version control system

Advanced Programming Topics (see also Java-specific resources)

• Learning New Languages: Exercism - download and solve problems in 30 different programming languages.

• Bartosz Milewski: Programming Cafe - type theory and other abstract concepts; a dose of humility if you think you know how to program!

• Inside a super fast CSS engine – internals of the Mozilla Stylo component

• Graydon Hoare: What Next? – a list of open issues in theoretical programming language design

• The Commandline Challenge - a fun way to test your Unix commandline skills

• The Go Garbage Collector - how Go’s runtime achieves such low garbage-collection-pauses, and the tradeoffs it makes

• Evan Miller: Four Days of Go - an interesting and entertaining look at the Go programming language

• Functor and Monad Examples in Java

Programming Reference Documents

• Bash Scripting for the Reluctant - helpful “cheat sheet” information for shell-scripting under Unix

• WebsiteSetup: CSS Cheat Sheet - a nice (and complete) summary of all CSS3 (cascading stylesheets) elements and attributes

Useful Links related to Databases

• Faster SQL Paging Using the Seek Method

• Postgres Transaction Handling

• Seldo: ORM is an Anti-pattern

• Wikipedia: the Active Record Pattern

Useful links related to Cryptography

• LearnCryptography - an introduction to cryptography for beginners/intermediates

• What is Kerberos

• [video] Michel Schudel/Youtube: Crypto 101 for Java Developers

Useful links related to IT Security

• Schneier: The Availability Heuristic

Interesting Blogs

• Octo

Distributed Systems

• Microsoft OAM and DAPR - tools for developing microservices and kubernetes-based applications.

Amusing (but also sadly true)

• [video] The Expert - a short example of the “business analysis” phase of a project
• The half-arsed Agile Manifesto - when the Agile Manifesto meets reality
• OPS Lessons - the hard truth about how complex IT systems actually work, eg:
  • Some of your most critical services are kept alive by a handful of people whose job description does not mention those services at all
  • If you break it, you own it - for now; if you fix it, you own it - forever.
• Commit Strip: A Comprehensive and Precise Spec - when programmers are no longer needed..

Quotes

• “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” – John Gall, Systemantics (as seen on slashdot)

• “My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent’. – Edsger Dijkstra

Other

• Configuration Management Tools Review : Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt

• CodingHorror: doing terrible things to your code – a great discussion of code-testing and producing production-ready code.

• React as a UI Runtime - a deep dive into the implementation of React

• Project Jigsaw: Late for the Train - some background to the Java module system